#72: Le Million

Le Million, 1931, directed by René Clair, written by René Clair, from the play by Georges Berr and Marcel Guillemaud.

Comedy doesn't travel well. When a movie is going to be translated and dubbed or subtitled, post-production gives translators a giant binder with an annotated version of the closed captioning, explaining every idiom, allusion, and pun. The goal is to give the translators enough information to try to make the jokes funny in whatever language they'll be appearing in. Results can be mixed. One of my oddest memories of Italy was watching a dubbed version of "The Simpsons." Faced with the difficult task of translating the show's intensely allusive verbal humor to Italian, the producers pretty much punted. I had to explain why Sideshow Bob would write a letter to "Vita In Questi Stati Uniti," and why that was cracking me up. By the time I'd jumped through all the cultural and linguistic hoops, the joke wasn't funny anymore. The big sellers in international markets are genres that aren't at the mercy of language.

It wasn't always this way, because film didn't used to depend on language much at all, except for the universal language of Wurlitzer music. The last comedy stars that truly transcended language and culture were in silent movies: Keaton, Lloyd, and Chaplin. Le Million is a sound film, but it's an early sound film, made by a director who didn't trust sound very much. As a result, the jokes are very physical and non-verbal. And universally funny. After the high-culture earnestness of The Magic Flute, it was a relief to watch Le Million and return to the kind of opera I grew up with:

The kind of opera where a fat lady with braids belts it out while comic hijinks happen backstage. Yep, Le Million is that kind of movie, less interested in bringing culture to the masses than bringing the masses to the movie theater. The hero is a down-on-his-luck artist named Michel Bouflette. As played by René Lefèvre, he's perfectly dazed by just about everything around him:

And when he's not dazed, he's getting into trouble. Michel is a bit of a scoundrel; this is mitigated by the fact that he's also a bumbler. As the film opens, he's attempting to seduce Vanda, a beautiful woman whose portrait he is painting.

Unfortunately for Michel, just as they're about to kiss, a young woman enters the apartment without knocking, sees Michel and Vanda, and leaves, clearly embarrassed. "You're probably wooing her," says Vanda. "No no no no no, not at all," Michel reassures her. "We're just sort of engaged." You see this scene in a lot of romantic comedies, but it's usually the inciting incident for the spurned fiancé's personal voyage (e.g., Along Came Polly). Only the French would have the cheater be the hero. It helps that Béatrice, Michel's fiancé (played by one-name-wonder Annabella) is a bit of a flirt herself:

I'm pleased to report that the whole film is as light and flirtatious as that still. That's particularly impressive because Le Million is at least partially about class warfare. Like any self-respecting young painter, Michel is pursued by an army of creditors:

But his local shopkeepers' contempt changes instantly to rapt admiration when they realize he's just won one million florins in the lottery. They quite literally sing his praises, falling over each other to please him:

Of course, Michel himself is affected by his sudden wealth. He's established early on as a dreamer, and a sudden influx of money doesn't really help him stay grounded.

Michel is the sort of person who comedies always make suffer a bit on the way to their happy ending. So it's not a big surprise when he realizes that Béatrice has loaned the coat that held the winning lottery ticket to a drifter. This is a standard screwball comedy plot, not exceptional in itself. What makes the movie is René Lefèvre's unsurpassed ability to suffer hilariously. One example: shortly after realizing he is not, in fact, a millionaire, Michel races to his apartment to grab a coat before leaving to track down his lottery ticket. It's one of those movie moments where TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE and EVERY SECOND COUNTS. Unfortunately, Michel's neighbors have prepared a little ceremony to commemorate his admirable achievement of winning a lot of money. A little girl recites a speech and presents him with a bouquet, and then everyone insists he pose for a photograph. He's not really into it, and the photographer's typically thorough instructions ("Smile a bit more. To the right. Hold it right there.") are excruciating. Here's the final photo:

He's sort of the anti-Falconetti. Most of the jokes in Le Million would have been equally easy to stage in a silent film; Clair depends on visual gags. There's the old fat-man-thin-man duo at the opera:

There's a highbrow master thief with a penchant for obviously false mustaches:

And of course, there's the tried and true "guy in a prison cell wearing only boxers and a bowler for no doubt hilarious reasons which are never explained" gag:

These characters and setups are straight out of silent films, and they don't depend on culture or language. The jokes people remember the film for, however, could never happen in a silent film. But they're still not dependent on language. Instead, they're innovative uses of the soundtrack that would seem fresh if used today.

The first is the one everyone writes about: the rugby or football match at the end. By the time all the major characters arrive at the opera, Clair has set up at least four distinct groups of people who want the lottery ticket. As you would expect, they have a battle royale backstage. However you staged this, there's a lot of potential for physical comedy. So even played silently, this sequence is pretty funny. But instead of relying on the visual gag alone, the filmmakers chose to have the diagetic sound fade out as soon as someone grabbed the coat, and faded up the sound of a crowd at a rugby match, complete with whistles and cheers. So as Michel and the others try to race past one another, blocking and tackling like pros, you hear yells and roars from the crowd and frantic whistles from referees as people go down. It adds to the feeling of general mayhem in a way that's impossible to describe until you see it. I've watched this scene at least ten times now, and it still cracks me up.

That said, the backstage madness isn't my favorite sequence in the movie. Le Million is a romantic comedy of sorts, and that means it has to have everyone's least favorite scene in any romantic comedy. You know the scene I'm talking about: where the guy tells the girl what a fool he's been and what a lesson he's learned and how much he loves her and if she'll just give him another chance... I hate this particular scene; it's never handled gracefully. And like any romantic comedy, Le Million has a version of it:

Only in Le Million this scene happens while Michel and Béatrice are hiding from the audience behind the onstage scenery at the opera. Which means they can't talk. Which means we don't have to listen to any insipid or out-of-character dialogue. Instead, we get to hear the two other people on stage, singing at the tops of their lungs about love:

Under that torrent of sound, Michel and Béatrice play their scene basically as a pantomime, showing the kind of physicality that more or less disappeared with the coming of sound:

It's absolutely perfect: light, flirtatious, and hilarious. René Clair makes me wish other filmmakers would manage this story beat as well. It wouldn't have to be as brilliant as Le Million; I'd settle for palatable. Anything to avoid hearing Owen Wilson give another heartfelt speech about love.

I said the film was partially about class warfare, but that probably isn't apparent from what I've described so far. But the more you pay attention to Le Million, the more you notice that its obsession with money has more of an edge than, say, Brewster's Millions. For one thing, pay attention to Michel's neighbor and friend, the interestingly named Prosper. When we first meet him, he's dressed as a servant, and basically friendly. He next appears in middle-class attire, by which I mean that he looks like a golfer:

In this outfit, he refuses to split his potential lottery winnings with Michel. By the end of the film, he's wearing a tuxedo and tails and getting into fistfights over money. The more upper-class his wardrobe, the more of a bastard he is. Then there's the character of Grandpa Tulip, (pictured above with a fake mustache), who leads an energetic group of pickpockets and thieves. The first time we see him presiding over a meeting of his confederates, he leads them in a song, energetically conducting, and stopping until they hit a high note correctly. That's silly and amusing enough that you might not notice what they're singing:

We are the foot soldiers of inequality!
We take back the spoils of social injustice!
And under the watchful eye of the police,
We redistribute wealth and private property!

It's closer to Brecht than Gilbert & Sullivan. Of course, lots of thieves cast themselves as Robin Hood, and lots of romantic comedies involve a frantic search for a large amount of money. But in your typical comedy about money, the lesson the hero has to learn is, basically, "Don't worry so much about money." And that lesson does get a hearing in the film's final song. All the characters sing, "Money isn't everything, so beware!" Fair enough. But the song continues:

So say folks who are intelligent
To folks who haven't got a cent.
We'll believe what they say,
When they give all their money away.

Priceless.

Randoms:

• The DVD features a kinescope of Jim MacAndrew interviewing René Clair from 1959. He's very interesting when talking about the way sound changed the landscape of filmmaking, despite looking a bit like Peter Lorre at his most disreputable:

Here's his basic point about the effect talkies had on comedy technique, French syntax intact:

Having the facility of words and dialogue, people were not obliged anymore to look for new forms of expression which were purely visual. Since the talkies, most of the best comedians came from the radio, which is a proof of what I say, you know. It means now they come because they can be brilliant in dialogue. You see, they might eventually be good at the action, you know, but you take them from the radio because they are famous on the radio, and as good dialogue— as good speakers, you see? Well, when a writer has to prepare a script for these people, he has not to worry about inventing visual things—you know that the comedian will be funny with words and dialogue. But for words and dialogue we have the stage, we have the radio, we don't need the motion picture.

Clair's concern no longer really applies, since the stage and the radio died as popular outlets for comedy soon afterwards. Unless you count wacky morning DJs.


• One other strange thing about Clair's television interview. It was broadcast live, but it features a clip from Le Million. It appears that the clip was being broadcast from a projector, because when MacAndrews calls for it to start, you hear the sound of a magnetic tape soundtrack coming up to pitch from a stopped position. It sounds like they just had a TV camera in a theater with a projector threaded to the right position and a mike next to a speaker. The squeal of the tape getting up to speed sparked some nostalgia, however; it's something that was quite familiar in the days of Walkmen, but I hadn't heard it in years, except when Mrs. Krabappel shows her class an educational film on "The Simpsons." Like the sound of a record needle hitting a scratch and bouncing off the record (which has come to mean "Someone has just said something shocking, but amusing!"), this is a sound effect that will eventually be completely detached from its signifier, until it just means "this sequence is meant to be appreciated as camp, like a classroom film of the 1950s."
  
  
• Le Million opens with a great effects shot, a lengthy track across the rooftops of Paris. Clair opens with a shot of two lovers bidding each other goodnight from their windows:

He then tracks right, where the life-size set is replaced by model buildings, very close to the camera:

And then closes with another life-sized roof, far to the right.

The effect is that of a helicopter shot, years before such a thing would be practical. And although the model work isn't perfect, this is done in a single shot; there aren't any Orson Welles-style hidden mattes. Here's a picture of the set. To the right, you can see the camera rails; in the foreground are the models, and in the distance, you can see one of the life-sized sets.

Forced perspective is something you rarely see these days (although Peter Jackson used it extensively in The Lord of the Rings), and I think that's a shame. Done correctly, it's completely seamless, and it's a lot cheaper than CGI, helicopters, or CGI helicopters.

#71: The Magic Flute

The Magic Flute, 1975, directed by Ingmar Bergman, from the opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder.

When someone says the name Ingmar Bergman, two words spring immediately to mind: Comic. Opera. Someone at Sveriges Radio made the obvious connection and hired Bergman to direct a film of Mozart's The Magic Flute to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the network. Filming an opera is perverse to begin with. Filming The Magic Flute, with its mess of a plot and paleolithic worldview, is stranger still. And hiring Bergman to direct is the coup de grâce.

Or perhaps not. While Bergman's popular image as Strindberg's heir makes him seem an odd choice, Peter Cowie writes that he is "an accomplished organist, and a musicologist with impressive knowledge of the Bach canon." File that piece of information right up there with Paul Verhoeven's doctorate in mathematics. And look at it this way: if you're a producer at Sveriges Radio, looking for a really fantastic anniversary film, what other Swedish directors are on your A-list?

Bergman's version of The Magic Flute is not the film I would have chosen to make. Mozart's opera is a mix of comedy and fantasy that seems well-suited for the movies. It has monsters, magic, battles, and a tour of Hell, all of which could be very cinematic. But instead of something like Branagh's Henry V, which really turns a play into a movie, however, Bergman chose to try to create on film an experience like seeing the opera performed in a theater. So the first shot after the overture is, well, what you'd see from the audience.

That's a meticulous reconstruction of the theater at Drottningholm Palace, built on a soundstage. I can appreciate what the filmmakers are going for here, but it seems like a step back from cinema. This initial impression isn't helped when "Zu Hilfe! Zu Hilfe!" starts playing and the dragon enters the stage:

That may be what audiences would have seen in 1791, but it looks too much like Trogdor the Burninator to really put you in the moment. If you know the opera (I didn't), you know that the dragon is pursuing Prince Tamino, a valiant fighter who valiantly gets himself knocked out. He's played by Josef Köstlinger.

Fortunately for Tamino, he's saved by three servants of the forest's ruler, the Queen of the Night, who are played by Birgitta Smiding, Kirsten Vaupel, and Britt-Marie Aruhn:

Unfortunately, he mistakenly believes he has been saved by Papageno, a hobbit-looking birdcatcher who lives in the same forest:

Once that hilarious misconception is straightened out, Birgit Nordin shows up as the Queen of the Night herself, looking more than a little ominous:

She makes Tamino an interesting proposition: if he can rescue her daughter Pamina from the evil magician who is holding her prisoner, he can marry her. It's not that hard a decision for Tamino, since Pamina is played by Irma Urrila:

It's not clear exactly why the Queen of the Night thinks Tamino is the man for the job, given his complete failure to even muss the dragon's hair, but there you have it. It turns out that the evil magician Sarastro is not so much evil as he is wise, and he's kidnapped Pamina from her mother so that she can... marry Tamino. Which is also what her mother wants. Here's the fantastically named Ulrik Cold as Sarastro, thinking about the great responsibility that comes with great power:

And here's the trustworthy Moor Sarastro has left to guard Pamina:

His name is Monostatos, he's played by Ragnar Ulfung, and he looks nothing at all like Ricky Gervais playing Andy Millman playing a genie in Extras.

So that's the basic premise. Did I mention the plot was kind of a mess? Of course, the plot isn't Bergman's fault; he inherited it from Mozart and Schikaneder. And to his credit, Bergman does what he can to clean it up. He makes Sarastro into Pamina's father, so his claim of patriarchal power is slightly more legitimate. Still, it's disconcerting to see an opera where the main point seems to be that only by submitting to the absolute will of a Masonic patriarch can one find happiness.

As you can see from the stills, the filmmakers really stick to the conceit that we're seeing this in a theater. Olivier used the same strategy in the first section of Henry V, but abandoned the confines of the stage when Henry leaves for France. I kept waiting for something similar in Bergman's movie, but although some scenes are blocked in ways that would be impossible on a stage, things never open up. That's probably to be expected from Bergman; even in movies that are ostensibly in the real world, he deals best with interiors. And in Autumn Sonata, he deliberately handles flashbacks as though they were on stage. The best sequences in The Magic Flute deal with interior space; he has a talent for putting you inside the heads of his characters. Take the lovely eyeline match that closes Act I. Sarastro has just told Pamina and Tamino that Tamino will have to undergo three trials before they can be married. Tamino's just been blindfolded and is being led off; it's not clear (especially given The Dragon Incident) that he'll ever return. Bergman cuts between Sarastro:

And Pamina:

And it's impossible not to be moved by the concern and worry in each of their eyes. Look at how delicately and carefully lit both shots are—this is Sven Nykvist's cinematography at its best. On the subject of lighting, note this shot of Pamina and Monostatos:

This is where being overtly theatrical pays off; that shot would be a hard sell in a more realistic film, but it's perfect here. And it's one of Bergman's favorite framings; you get to watch emotion play over both faces simultaneously. Compare it to the similar shot of Eva watching her mother play piano in Autumn Sonata and you'll see that this is what Bergman does best: mapping the interior spaces of people in pain. It's a cruel sort of talent, and I'm not sure it suits the material here, but nobody else was ever as good at this as Ingmar Bergman.

There's one other thing Bergman does phenomenally well, and that's horror. I've said it before and I'll say it again: this guy could have been the greatest horror director of all time. You can see this in "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen." Bergman has the Queen of the Night, in garish makeup, walk from side to side behind her attendants.

It's an inventive way of blocking this (and Mel Gibson appropriated it for Satan during the scourging scene in The Passion of the Christ); having the Queen's face move in and out of view rachets up the horribleness of the whole thing exponentially. Bergman also does an excellent job when Tamino and Pamina tour the underworld, and we see brief glimpses of people tearing each other apart through the flames:

Obscuring our vision of these torments (who seem to be straight out of Dante's fifth circle) is much more frightening than seeing them directly. So Bergman's doing all right when it comes to suffering and horror, but you could have guessed that. How is he with comedy? Surprisingly enough, not too shabby. I'm inclined to credit this to Håkan Hagegård's performance as Papageno, the comic center of the opera. He's easily the most charming of the cast, mostly because of his skill at playing misery for laughs:

And it takes a special kind of actor to make a suicide attempt hilarious:

But the truth is, no one sees The Magic Flute on stage or on film because it's emotionally resonant, or frightening, or funny; Schikaneder's libretto is kind of a disaster. It's a beloved part of the repertoire because of the music. And although everyone who has ever reviewed the film seems to disagree with me, I have to report that the music is only average. Or rather, it's adequate, with a giant exception. The highlight of any production of The Magic Flute is "Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen," an aria for colorata soprano sung by the Queen of the Night. It's so famously difficult that the almost-never-used high note in is sometimes referred to as the "Queen of the Night F." And although I'm not an opera critic, I don't think Birgit Nordin quite pulled it off. By way of comparison, here's Lucia Popp singing a difficult passage in an Otto-Klemperer-conducted performance from 1964:

And here's Birgit Nordin singing the same passage in Bergman's film:

It's not a question of musical taste; compare the pure, clear sound of Lucia Popp's voice to Nordin's and you can, I hope, hear the problem. It's probably churlish to judge an entire opera by its most difficult passage, and most of it was fine. But the sound's a little muddy throughout (and the film is discolored in that seventies-yellowed fashion). This is particularly strange because the sound is of historical importance; Peter Cowie writes that this was the very first stereo production for television. If a recording from 1964 sounds clearer, you probably need to remaster. And given the wonderful restoration work Criterion has done on other films, I couldn't believe they left the sound on an opera untouched.

The experience of watching The Magic Flute was more frustrating than enjoyable for me. There are so many elements in the opera that cry out for a broader treatment than the filmmakers give them here, so many missed opportunities. Most of the sets, and effects on the stage are designed to make small spaces seem large, and by the end of the film I wanted to scream, "Just take the fucking camera outside!" Filming the opera as though the audience is seeing it in a theater is an interesting conceptual idea. In the end, however, The Magic Flute is a fantasy, not the kind of claustrophobic interior story that lends itself to this kind of staging. In short, it's not a Bergman movie. But if Radio New Zealand wants to celebrate an anniversary in the next few years, I know just the director.

Randoms:

• The overture gets heat from virtually everyone who writes about this film. The filmmakers cut through carefully edited reaction shots of a multiracial audience enjoying the music. It's not a bad idea, I guess (and putting visuals to the overture is not an easy problem, if you start with the assumption that the curtain won't go up until after it's finished). But the sequence is way too long, and feels distinctly earnest in a way I associate only with the 1970s. It's easily the most dated part of the film. Here's the obligatory bindi shot:

• The filmmakers burn through any good racial karma earned with the overture during the intermission, with a close up of one of Monostatos's henchmen, in terrible blackface. Monostatos himself is in blackface, but you're in trouble when you start using prosthetic noses.

Did these people learn nothing from Alec Guinness in Oliver Twist?


• If you like William Blake, you owe it to yourself to see this film, or some production of The Magic Flute. I hadn't realized the extent to which Blake was reacting to his age's zeitgeist. The Magic Flute is a perfect inversion of Blake's mythology, with Urizen as hero.
  
  
• The dragon that opens the opera is pretty silly looking, but he's got nothing on the simultaneously absurd and creepy animals that Tamino sings to later on:

Those rabbits will haunt my dreams. And although we're in the middle of the forest here, yes, that is a walrus:

Finally, there's this shot:

I'm sure if Werner Herzog were looking into that bear's dead eyes, he'd say something profound about the inherent hostility and chaos of nature, but all I could think was "Threatdown!"

#70: The Last Temptation of Christ

The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988, directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Paul Schrader, from the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis.

A little thought experiment. As I write this, Spiderman 3 has grossed $754,924,527 worldwide. It's one of the most successful movie franchises in history. And anyone will tell you that's because most people are already familiar with the characters (it certainly wasn't because the movie was any good). Spiderman has great mental real estate. But imagine if it had the kind of mental real estate the Bible has. Nearly 40% of Americans would attend weekly meetings to listen, discuss, think, and sing about Spiderman. Children would be taught simplified versions of the Spiderman stories from the moment they could understand language. For centuries, virtually all Western art would use themes, characters, and images from the Spiderman stories. There'd be a constant battle to keep Spiderman out of the public schools—at least for those of us lucky enough to live in a nation founded on a separation between Spiderman and state. And Mitt Romney would keep saying that America needs a to be led by a "person of Spidey-Sense." So to a casual observer, Biblical movies should be a no-brainer for both studios and filmmakers. Then why are there so few, and why are they so boring?

The problem is that Biblical stories, paradoxically, have too much mental real estate. The guys who flood message boards with posts about how "SAM RAIMI IS TEH SUXXOR" because he didn't exactly follow the story from the original comic books have nothing on Jesus fanboys; those guys firebomb theaters. But even if you appease the fanatics, you have to deal with the lukewarm, neither cold nor hot.¹ Most people are convinced that they already know the Bible.² For the most part, church is popular because it's part of the social fabric of many communities, not because it's spiritually challenging. So to engage an audience, a filmmaker has more to overcome than someone making a completely original story; he or she must shock the audience out of their complacent relationship with their faith, convince them they're seeing something new and interesting. Without shocking them enough to get anyone killed. Some filmmakers approach this through spectacle; this is the approach taken in The King of Kings and most of the biblical epics of the sixties. Some filmmakers go the opposite extreme; Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew is nearly neo-realist. Some filmmakers take refuge in the bizarre. And some filmmakers turn the gospels into torture-porn. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese took an approach closer to Pasolini than De Mille. In the process, he created one of the most engaging films about faith ever made. But all anyone remembers is that he pissed off the fanboys.

Scorsese opens the movie with a shot of some reassuring stunt-casting:

That's Willem Dafoe as Jesus. Light hair and eyes, European features; he's of the plaster saint school. In fact, this is doubly soothing, because audiences had just seen Dafoe in a similar role:

So despite Dafoe's slightly disquieting voiceover ("Claws slip underneath the skin and tear their way up. Just before they reach my eyes, they dig in."), we're in familiar territory here. The next shot is similarly relaxing:

It's Christ as carpenter. Although he's not a pioneer of furniture design like Gibson's Jesus, this is about where the audience sits back and relaxes, preparing for a Sunday morning nap. Which is when Judas tears into his house:

It's Harvey Keitel, playing the worst lieutenant. And then we find out what Jesus' carpentry project was about:

In this version of the Gospels, Jesus is making crosses for the Romans. As part of a campaign to avoid his own destiny. As he puts it:

God loves me. I know he loves me.

I want him to stop.

... I want him to hate me. I make crosses so he'll hate me. I want him to find somebody else. I want to crucify every one of his messiahs.

To say that this is a unique portrayal of Christ before he begins his ministry would be an understatement. Jesus' character in The Last Temptation of Christ is not unique in cinema, however. On the contrary, this Jesus is a familiar type: Rick in Casablanca, Schindler in Schindler's List. He's what Jim Shepard calls the "hero in disguise." There's never any real doubt that Christ will take up his own cross.³ But it takes him a while to get there.

The early structure of the film is surprisingly simple: Jesus meets three spiritual leaders who refine his theology and redirect his mission. The first is a monk of sorts named Jeroboam,⁴ who redeems Jesus from his apostasy and convinces him to begin preaching. Jesus sees his relationship with God as a curse, but Jeroboam envies him:

I don't know what God wants from me. All my life I've wanted to hear God's voice. I've dedicated my life to him. Sometimes I think I feel him, but I'm never really sure. But you always know.

After this meeting, Jesus begins his ministry, preaching a modernized version of the Sermon on the Mount that ends in chaos when the crowd interprets his message to basically mean "Eat the rich." Worried that he has misunderstood his mission, he meets with John the Baptist. The film's version of the voice crying in the wilderness is kind of a permanent revivalist meeting:

After John advises Jesus that he must not only love righteousness but hate wickedness, Jesus is tempted in the desert and returns ready to destroy evil, looking like a Greek Orthodox icon. Here's one of the cinematographer Michael Ballhaus's most painterly shots:

If the audience isn't 't already thinking of iconography, this scene ends with the sacred heart itself:

From here on out, Jesus styles himself as a political and religious revolutionary: he makes his first visit to the Second Temple⁵ and throws out the money changers. But this is also not his destiny, which is finally made clear to him by the prophet Isaiah, played by Martin Scorsese himself:

Isaiah makes everything clear to Jesus, and from here on out we're on more or less secure theological ground. Jesus returns to Jerusalem, causes a scene at the Second Temple, has some bread and wine, and you know how the story ends:

You can't write about The Last Temptation of Christ without addressing the film's critics; unfortunately, their arguments are mostly theological, not cinematic. So: theology. The Last Temptation of Christ occupies a kind of middle ground between textualism and, well, something else. As in any biopic, some of the chronology is rearranged to suit the structure (and the larger theme of Christ as someone who refined his mission as he went along). The imagined purification scene with Jeroboam takes the place of Jesus' meeting with John the Baptist in the original Gospels (probably because adding a wholly imagined scene that led to Christ becoming "angry Jesus" would have been harder to swallow). But the chronology shouldn't be that big a deal; John doesn't agree with the synoptic Gospels, either. There are three more serious theological problems with The Last Temptation of Christ. I think all three can be reconciled, but I don't really have a dog in this hunt, so take my opinion with a pillar of salt.

The first—and the one that got all the press—takes place during the "Last Temptation" of the title. In Scorsese's film, Satan appears to Jesus while he is on the cross, in the guise of a young girl (Juliette Caton, who later played Heidi in Courage Mountain):

She tells him that his sacrifice was merely a test of loyalty, like Isaac's: God is pleased with him, and no longer requires him to suffer. He is not the Messiah, not divine, and may live a quiet life as a man. Her dialogue is exquisitely written to be seemingly soothing but have uneasy resonances (e.g., on the beauty of God's creation, "Maybe you'll find this hard to believe, but sometimes we angels look down on men and envy you. Really envy you."⁶). Jesus is given the opportunity to grow old and happy, and takes it. With that opportunity comes Magdalene, who has a different role this version of the story. Here, she is not someone Jesus meets during his minstry, but a childhood friend whose love Jesus rejected as a young man. She's played wonderfully by Barbara Hershey:

Now that he is no longer the messiah, Jesus marries her. After her death he has children with Martha and Mary, and grows old with them:

During this time he embraces an incrementalist view of salvation

This is the way the Savior comes. Gradually, from embrace to embrace.

and explicitly rejects his earlier views, telling the angel,

I'm ashamed when I think of it... Of all the mistakes I've made. Of all the wrong ways I looked for God.

This is an interesting theological viewpoint, and a human one. But as Judas tells him, "What's good for man isn't good for God." God, as any Young Earth Creationist will tell you, is a cataclysmist. Fittingly, Jesus realizes he has been deceived during a cataclysm, the destruction of the Second Temple. He begs God for a second chance and his life after the crucifixion is revealed to have been a hallucination; he dies on the cross, redeeming man. None of this strikes me as heretical; Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in the desert, so he could certainly tempt him with domestic life. People were particularly shocked by a single shot in this sequence, however:

Saying "Jesus married Magdalene" is one thing, but showing them making love has a certain visceral punch to it that angered the faithful. Again, I don't think this provokes much legitimate theological controversy, as it's part of a temptation (and not just that, but one that occurs at Jesus' moment of greatest spiritual doubt, between "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and "It is finished"). Still, this was the focus for much of the outrage that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ. Never underestimate the power of images. Ironically, focusing outrage on this scene was almost certainly a tactical error for fundamentalist critics of the film. Universal was able to characterize the fundamentalists as Puritans, offended by some theologically non-problematic sex (not only is Jesus fully human in this scene, he's married, and not only that, but it's a hallucination, and a temptation, and the image is created in Jesus' mind by Satan himself, and Jesus rejects it absolutely).⁷ The movie has two other fundamental heresies that were more or less ignored in media coverage of the controversy.

The most obvious is the film's treatment of Judas. The film's Judas is Jesus' first and most faithful disciple, the only one who realizes the meaning of his sacrifice. Scorsese has Jesus beg Judas to betray him so that he may fulfill Isaiah's prophecy and reconcile God and man ("Without you, there can be no redemption"). You can make a scriptural case for this. Jesus knows he is going to be betrayed by one of his disciples, and at least in John, he embraces this, telling Judas, "That thou doest, do quickly." But both the Bible and church doctrine seem pretty clear that this was a betrayal, not a heroic act. In fact, The Last Temptation of Christ's version of Judas is very close to one of the earliest heresies, denounced by Irenaeus of Lyon in the second century. A group of Gnostics were, like Kazantzakis, Schrader, Cocks, and Scorsese, claiming Judas had the clearest understanding of Jesus' mission on earth; they produced the recently-unearthed Gospel of Judas.⁸ But Judas's place in Christian cosmology doesn't stir up the faithful as much as the idea of Jesus having sex. And the water is murky here anyway; the Church has never officially proclaimed Judas is in Hell.

The strongest theological argument against The Last Temptation of Christ is the doctrine that Jesus lived without sin. It's obvious that the film's Jesus sins; he tells Jeroboam this quite explicitly.

I'm a liar. A hypocrite. I'm afraid of everything. I don't tell the truth—I don't have the courage! When I see a woman, I blush and look away. I want her, but I don't take her, for God, and that makes me proud. Then my pride ruins Magdalene. I don't steal, I don't fight, I don't kill. Not because I don't want to, but because I'm afraid.

Now Matthew has Jesus say "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." So Jesus is in trouble here, never mind building crosses for the Romans. It comes down to what you think it means to say that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. In the synoptic Gospels, there's no mention that Christ was sinless. But in John, written later, he is called without sin (only once). By the time Paul rolls around, however, this is church doctrine. The movie is aware of this problem and makes a familiar argument: Paul's version of Christianity is not Jesus'. It makes the case in a non-conventional way, however, through a clever bit of casting.

Call it the Harry Dean Stantonian Heresy. Scorsese has Jesus actually meet Harry Dean Stanton's Paul during his vision of life after the cross, and Paul tells him in no uncertain terms that he feels free to reinterpret his teachings as he sees fit:

I created the truth out of what people needed and what they believed. If I have to crucify you to save the world, then I'll crucify you. And if I have to resurrect you, then I'll do that, too. ...You don't know how much people need God. You don't know how happy he can make them. Happy to do anything. He can make them happy to die and they'll die. All for the sake of Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus of Nazareth. The Son of God. The Messiah. Not you. Not for your sake. You know, I'm glad I met you. Because now I can forget all about you. My Jesus is much more important and much more powerful.

Of course, it gets complicated, because Paul is right; it's the resurrected Jesus who matters. And this is a dream anyway. But if you accept that Paul's version is modified, and that his main doctrinal addition was Jesus' sinless purity, you can reconcile Scorsese's Jesus with the man from the synoptic gospels. In all three, Jesus chastises a man who calls him "Good Master," saying, "Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God." Still, if you believe Paul's writings are divinely inspired, casting Harry Dean Stanton is unlikely to convince you otherwise.

So that's the theology; what about the film? Many people had problems with the casting and the accents. Harvey Keitel speaks like, well, Harvey Keitel, with a pronounced New York accent, as do the apostles. This may seem crazy, and the movie took a lot of heat for it, but it was a conscious choice. Scorsese says on the commentary track that the traditional approach here here, using the language of the King James translation, wouldn't work because, "if the audience heard that language, and heard a British accent, they could be safe, they could turn off. it's just a Biblical movie." Scorsese, Schrader, and Cocks wanted to engage the audience more directly. That's why the dialogue echoes the Bible but almost never quotes it directly. And as Schrader puts it, colloquial English is "as appropriate as King James's language. It's not as appropriate as Aramaic but you're not gonna get Aramaic." I like to think Mel Gibson heard this commentary track and said to himself, "Oh, yeah?" For the most part, for me, the colloquial English worked the way it was supposed to. For one thing, giving the lower-class apostles New York accents sets up a nice contrast when the Pontius Pilate shows up, with a British accent. It creates the same cultural divide that Aramaic and Latin do in The Passion of the Christ. It's the Rebel Alliance/Galactic Empire school of dialogue coaching, and it works very well here. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Pilate is a million times cooler and more aristocratic than anyone else in the movie:

Yes, that's David Bowie, the man who was cool enough to make even Zoolander seem sophisticated. When Jesus tells him his kingdom is "not here. Not on earth," he replies, "It wouldn't be, would it?" Too, too dry. Bowie's Pilate is a pragmatist, but actually more involved in Christ's death than he is in the Bible; Barabbas isn't in this version. Instead of washing his hands, Pilate tells Jesus, "It simply doesn't matter how you want to change things. We don't want them changed." This puts Jesus back in the social revolutionary mode, at least from the perspective of the ruling class, and while it's wrong for Pilate, this is pretty much the attitude Caiphas and company have in the Gospels. So on the whole, I think the language works. Like any biopic, the script has a few awkward moments; the worst is Jesus saying, "Go back to sleep. Judas and I are talking."⁹ But I think this is an acceptable price to pay for the way the dialogue engages the audience directly, and forces us to think about the meaning behind speeches we've heard hundreds of times before.

The cinematography, as you've probably noticed, is brilliant. This is the first film in which Scorsese really used exteriors, and he masters it quickly. Christ's temptation in the desert is a particular standout:

More than just being beautifully shot, Scorsese makes Jesus' world seem realistic in a way that every other Biblical epic I've seen has utterly failed to do. Even Gibson, with his painstaking verisimilitude, produced a world in which everyone seemed to be bathing regularly. And Gibson's version of the Second Temple misses out on something I would think he would have seized on: at the time, services revolved around Korbanot (that's why people were selling doves right next to the moneychangers). The Last Temptation of Christ gets this detail right, down to the drainage system:

The effect is of a deeply ancient and foreign world, but thanks to the language, a world we are forced to confront directly. This is mirrored in Peter Gabriel's magnificent score, which blends traditional instruments with synthesizers. The result is spiritually affecting, though not exactly in the way Scorsese might have wished. Listening to the commentary track, it is clear that Schrader and Scorsese had a fundamentally different view of the purpose of the project. Scorsese talks about it as though it is simply a different way to tell the life of Jesus, his version of the Gospels. Every technique he describes serves that purpose, making the audience directly involved in Jesus' life story, explicitly as a way of spreading faith. In this sense, he was engaged in the same project Gibson was. For Schrader, the goal was more complicated. Early in the commentary, he says that the real blasphemy in the story was not theological, but the idea of using "Jesus Christ as a metaphor." If you see The Last Temptation of Christ as an allegory about the struggle between the sacred and profane in human lives, the whole project becomes suddenly, blindingly clear. The point is not that Jesus went through this suffering so that we never have to; rather, the movie is about embracing the difficult, great thing you have inside you, instead of the smaller, easier paths that blur your road. Jesus does everything he can to avoid his destiny because this is what is easiest. It's worth noting that this is also true in the Gospels, in Gethsemane. In the end, however, and at great cost, he does what he knows he is capable of, and becomes the best version of himself.

For me, it all comes together when Jesus returns to Jerusalem for Passover. Scorsese opens with close shots of the disciples, who are anxiously discussing what's about to happen to them. Peter approaches Jesus and asks him, "Will there be angels there to meet us? Or anyone, besides who's here?" Jesus gives him a smile, and puts his arm around him, just as Peter Gabriel's score switches to the relative major¹⁰ and becomes nearly transcendent. Shortly thereafter, Scorsese sets up a magnificent tracking shot, which puts us behind a row of stalls and people waving palms; in the distance, we move along Jesus riding triumphantly into Jerusalem. Just when I was convinced Scorsese had decided we would only see this moment from a distance, as part of the crowd, the camera veers into the Temple entrance, and Jesus rides right toward the camera:

This is how we are meant to welcome the better angels of our nature. We were not born to hide behind others, nor to run away from our talents. We have a responsibility to make the necessary sacrifices for moments of transformation. And as The Last Temptation of Christ suggests, we should embrace what we can become not grudgingly or fearfully, but with joy.

Randoms:

• This movie nearly was made at Paramount in 1983, but the production was shut down before cameras started rolling, when United Artists Theaters (now part of Regal) informed Paramount that they would not show it in their theaters. The original version would have starred Aidan Quinn, been shot in Israel (the sets had been built), and had a production budget of close to 20 million dollars. The film was ultimately made at Universal for seven million dollars all in. Blockbuster still carries it in only a few locations. Thanks, fundamentalism! It's interesting to compare this to the reception The Da Vinci Code received. This is a film that asserts that Christ had children with Magdalene, that she is the Holy Grail, and that Jesus' descendants walk the earth today. But because this bit of blasphemous flimflammery was wrapped in a big-budget thriller instead of a thought-provoking film that actively dealt with spirituality, nobody much cared. Never mind the cottage industry of books answering the burning question of how "true" the "facts" are in a story that asks the audience to believe in the Priory of Sion. And that doesn't even get into Dan Brown's appalling prose. OK. I'm going to go calm down now.
  
  
• With such a small budget, Scorsese had to rely on tricks he learned while working for Roger Corman. In the scene where Roman soldiers attack Christ's followers at the temple, the same four soldiers are used again and again. Scorsese uses whip pans to make it appear that the temple is surrounded. Low-budget filmmakers, take note!
  
  
• James, Son of Zebedee is played by none other than John Lurie.

This made it difficult for me not to hear the theme music for Fishing with John in my head whenever he's on screen, especially when he says, "I can just imagine in Galilee right now... the sea. They say the fishing's so good, you just touch the nets and the fish jump in."


• The DVD features production footage that Scorsese shot on videotape while on location in Morocco. There's one shot that should be very reassuring to all would-be directors:

As someone murdered "Good Night, Irene" on an acoustic in the background, Scorsese pointed the camera at a mirror and recorded himself saying, "I wonder if this flickering red light means that we're taping?" So your YouTube diaries aren't so amateurish after all—or at least you're in good company.


• You probably know that Scorsese is a huge fan of Powell and Pressburger; he recorded a commentary track for The Red Shoes, and helped rescue Peeping Tom from obscurity. While making The Last Temptation of Christ, he was able to indulge himself with a few acts of fandom of his own. First, he had Leo Marks, the screenwriter for Peeping Tom, record the voice of Satan when he appears as a pillar of fire. Second, Michael Powell himself dropped by the studio while he was mixing the score with Peter Gabriel. This is right up there with the Big Three at Yalta:

• I described Michael Ballhaus's cinematography as "painterly", and this is true, but sometimes his sources are unexpected. He expertly evokes Bosch during the Passion. Here's Bosch's Christ Carrying the Cross:

And here's how Ballhaus renders it in 1.85:1:

I think that's a masterful both in choice of source material and execution. But in the same sequence, there's a baffling quote of Steve McCurry's Afghan Girl:

Compare to the original:

It's a nice version of the image (even without the startling greens of the original), but I'm not sure what it's doing there.


• One thing the film gets right (and most Biblical movies get wrong) is Christ's embrace of life during his ministry. Luke has people say of him, "Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!" You would have to be seriously deranged to mistake any other Biblical Jesus for a gluttonous man or a winebibber, but The Last Temptation of Christ shows him as truly celebratory (which is not to say gluttonous or drunk) during the wedding at Cana. Besides that, the movie makes the unprecedented suggestion that, at least until the crucifixion, being Jesus may have been at times, well, fun. Here, he's raising a glass as his disciples discover that he's turned the jugs of water to wine:

I'm not a religious man, but if I were, that's the kind of messiah I'd want to follow.

¹And you can't spue them into the theaters.

²Most people were also convinced that Saddam Hussein helped plan the attacks of September 11.

³Simon of Cyrene is absent from this version of the story; the logic demands that Christ carry his own cross, since he carried others' at the beginning.

⁴The IMDB incorrectly has this as "Jerobeam."

⁵Not counting his visit there as an adolescent, which is not in the film. Note that some biblical scholars believe that the differences in the chronology of this event between the synoptic Gospels and John indicates that Jesus did this twice, as Scorsese has it.

⁶c.f. Milton. When Satan first sees Earth, "Such wonder seis'd.../ The Spirit maligne, but much more envy seis'd/ At sight of all this World beheld so faire."

⁷You can read an interesting post-mortem on the campaign against the film from the perspective of a fundamentalist here.

⁸The Gospel of Judas has Gnostic elements absent from The Last Temptation of Christ, but both share the idea of Judas as Christ's most faithful disciple, who betrayed him according to his instructions.

⁹This is nowhere near the all-time winner for bad biopic dialogue, from Max: "Come on, Hitler, I'll buy you a glass of lemonade."

¹⁰One of Gabriel's most effective tricks, c.f. "Mercy Street" and "Digging in the Dirt."